


Beast of Unknown

by B_R_M



Category: The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, X-Men - All Media Types
Genre: Action/Adventure, F/M, Mild Gore, Mystery, Romance, Strong Female Characters, Tony Stark Has A Heart, and a temper oof she will stab when angry, bitch has knives in her hands, not your mother's crossover, oh god what even ARE timelines, snark and sass
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-04
Updated: 2021-01-10
Packaged: 2021-03-14 08:08:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,786
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28542297
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/B_R_M/pseuds/B_R_M
Summary: She woke up alone, splayed in the dirt with only the clothes on her back and her memory gone. The one thing tying her to her mysterious past was a pair of silver dog tags that dangled from her neck. WOLVERINE said one, and LOGAN said the other. Maybe she'd lost her mind and escaped from the place – at least what was left beneath the rubble – where she'd awoken. Or perhaps there was something more sinister related to her origins.Either way, Logan was going to get answers. Even if that meant joining a group of super-powered humans.(Who could you trust when you didn't even know who you were?)[Marvel Avengers - X-Men AU]cross-posted to my wattpad
Relationships: Logan (X-Men)/Tony Stark
Comments: 3
Kudos: 10





	1. Prologue: Fury

**SHE SHOULD HAVE KNOWN BETTER** than to have returned to the scene of the crime. Then again, it wasn't like she was the one who had done anything wrong. Well, if you counted practically killing four men as wrong, but technically it had been self-defense. And it wasn't as if the owner of the place kicked her out. If anything, her being there guaranteed his safety.

Logan stared through the dark brown liquid to the bottom of the quarter filled glass. Some may have called her an alcoholic, and maybe she would have agreed with them if she could've remembered anything at all past four weeks ago. Stretching her boot clad legs further beneath the rickety wooden table, Logan took another sip of whiskey and reveled as it burned a spiderweb through her veins. It wouldn't affect her, but she liked the taste of it anyway.

The slightly crowded dive bar she'd discovered last week had gotten a few new renovations – partly her fault. However, the musty scent of alcohol, sweat, and unwashed pits that invaded her elevated senses stayed the same. Some rock song playing from the speakers pricked at her ears, mixing in with the drunken cacophony, but Logan didn't mind all that much. Maybe the slight pain and irritation it caused would help her regain her lost memory.

Though she wouldn't bet on it, it helped to have hope. No matter how little.

"Excuse me."

Logan glanced up with a flick of her dark brown eyes. Standing in front of her table pushed all the way against the far corner, was a man she'd never seen before. Well, at least not in the past four weeks. Because she was pretty sure that she'd remember the stern looking man with an eyepatch over his left eye.

His head was shaved of any hair, though some of it seemed to have relocated to his face in the shape of a goatee. Dark skin glistened beneath the cheap fluorescent lights dangling from the ceiling. With a long, leather coat that matched the same material as Logan's jacket, the man looked like someone who didn't smile much. Or laugh. Or any other synonym of the sort.

Not that she couldn't relate.

"Mind if I sit here," the man asked with a nonchalant wave of his hand towards the unoccupied chair across from her.

"You can fuck off." It'd been a long day and to be frank, Logan had no interest in being hit on or flirted with by Petey the Pirate. Raising a brow, she leaned back against her uncomfortable chair, took another swig from her glass, and looked up to the television on the wall playing a muted stream of the news. 

Instead of leaving her alone, the chair scraped across the sticky floor and had her clenching her fingers around her glass. Logan may not have known much about herself, but what she did was that there was nothing more she hated than being bothered. 

She turned her glare onto her unwanted table partner. "You half-blind _and_ deaf?"

"I can guarantee you," he began with a stern voice as he rested his arms on the table and folded his hands. "That I passed my yearly medical exam with flying colors."

Narrowing her eyes in irritation, Logan contemplated how hard she'd have to throw her glass to kill him.

Her slender fingers twitched.

Probably not much at all.

"I'm getting the feeling that you don't like small talk," the man leaned slightly forward. "So, let's cut to the chase. My name is Nick Fury, Director of S.H.I.E.L.D., and I've come to talk to you about the Avenger's Initiative."

Logan chased a scoff with the rest of her drink and stood up. "Pass." Just as she started to walk away, Nick said something that gave her pause.

"What I find interesting is that despite your obviously enhanced abilities, there's not a lot of information on you in our systems, Logan. Or should I call you Wolverine?"

"What?" She turned to look at him over her shoulder. How did he know who she was? About what she could do? How did he know _that_ name?

He didn't answer right away, just gestured at her now empty chair in a silent command to sit back down. The petite woman was stuck between wanting to leave and wanting to know how much he knew about her. And why.

After a moment of deliberation, she slid back into her seat. "Who are you really? How do you know me? Explain yourself or I walk."

Nick shrugged. "I think that should be my question. As for how I know you, well, I don't really, but I know that you've been participating in illegal underground fighting rings for the past three and a half weeks. And I know what you can do. I know what you _did_ do. Here. Last week. And let's just say that it caught my attention."

Logan may have been inflicted with amnesia, but she sure as hell knew that that man wouldn't be able to do a thing to hurt her. So, she didn't feel afraid that her was aware of what she'd done. Then again, perhaps she was getting a little ahead of herself.

The incident he was referring to occurred six days, fourteen hours, eighteen minutes and forty-three seconds ago, shall we? 


	2. Rock 'Em, Sock 'Em

SIX DAYS, FOURTEEN HOURS, EIGHTEEN MINUTES AND FORTY-THREE SECONDS AGO

 ** **SHE FELT THE BONES**** crush beneath her fist as the sound of it echoed in her ears.

The crowd roared, their voices background noise to the pained howl the man standing across the makeshift ring let out. He crashed into the cage surrounding the makeshift ring and blood flooded his face from his now broken nose like a faucet, drip, drip, dripping down his chin to the dirty concrete below their feet. Logan would’ve felt bad for hitting him so hard, if it weren’t for the fact that he’d taken one look at her short stature before their fight began and laughed so much that he’d cried.

Now, her brown eyes tracked the way his own welled up involuntarily due to her crushing his sinuses. _How befitting_ , she thought with the barest of smirks touching her full lips. And she’d barely even tried. If she’d used more than one percent of her actual strength, she was pretty positive that his face would’ve caved in beneath the weight of her fist.

The small scratches she’d gotten on her knuckles due to the man’s teeth knitted and healed before he’d even pulled himself together. The air in the basement of the warehouse was humid, and Logan watched with keenly sharp eyes as beads of sweat all but poured from the man’s pale skin. His limp brunette hung down in front of his face like a curtain until he brushed it back with a shaking hand. An almost animal-like shout left his bloodied mouth and he lunged at her, slightly staggering from what was probably a concussion.

Logan barely even had to bend her torso to avoid his incoming swing, every move she made purely instinctual. She ducked beneath the wide arc of his arm and jabbed her right fist out to deliver a punch to his solar plexus just gentle enough not to cause his ribs to collapse and impale his heart. He may have been a prick, but Logan didn’t murder anyone she didn’t have to.

(At least she didn’t think that she did.)

Though he’d pissed her off, so he deserved to have a few of his bones broken.

A wheeze _whooshed_ from between his bloodied lips as all of the air in his body was expelled. It mixed with the cracking of his ribs and more bodiless cheers from the crowd screaming for more carnage, more bloodshed. The man collapsed to his knees; a hand pressed to his chest in an attempt to somehow force more oxygen into his lungs.

They weren’t participating in some legalized, refereed sport. The rules of illegal underground fighting were simple: no weapons, and the only way out of a match was through total knock-out. Or death. Whichever came first.

The fight had just begun, and Logan was already prepared to finish it. Hell, she _did_ finish it when she followed up by kicking her booted foot into the man’s shoulder light enough to send him sprawling the rest of the way to the ground in a heap. Two seconds turned to three which evolved into four and then five. Six sharp rings from the bell by the announcer’s metal foldout table called the match.

And the roar of the crowd cheering her name followed her out of the ring.

_Logan! Logan! Logan! Logan!_

****═══════════** ** ****⍛** ** ****══════════** **

“Leave it.”

Jack the bartender, a short, stout blond man with a handlebar moustache, raised an eyebrow but didn’t comment. He left the bottle of Jack Daniels in front of her on the counter and retreated to the other side of the counter. Logan quickly knocked back what was in her glass before pouring herself some more. The alcohol burned on the way down like an old friend, one that she apparently recognized even without her memories.

Screaming Jenny was a bar located in Wisconsin, smack dab in the middle of nowhere right next to a twenty-four-seven diner and a consignment shop. The closest big city was hundreds of miles away and Logan would’ve been lying if she’d said she didn’t like the scent of the crisp mountain air and sharp pine needles. For the past three weeks, she’d been on the move almost nonstop. However, there was something about the quaint little town she’d found herself in that had caught her attention.

Or perhaps it was the underground fighting that had done the trick.

After hitchhiking her way from town to town with nothing but a flash of a fake smile to whatever idiot was dumb enough to stop for her, she knew that she was in need of money. To go where and to do what, she hadn’t a clue, but she wouldn’t uncover the mystery of her past by sitting around on her ass. And what better way to make money than by beating the ever-loving shit out of big men who believed themselves to be invincible?

They came from the city, from the nearby settlements, from out of state like roaches, just to hit the blood out of one another. One fight had gotten Logan enough money to be able to afford a few night’s stay at the dump of a motel in town. And one fight led to two and then more and more until the whole town knew her name and her pockets were getting full.

She’d planned to move on soon, in the next week to be exact. Whatever key there was to unlocking her past, it wasn’t there and she didn’t see the point in wasting any more time.

Eyeing the bottle of amber liquid in front of her, Logan sighed silently through her nose from her stool at the bar. She didn’t know why she drank because it wasn’t as if she was able to get drunk off of it. Whatever it was that caused her to heal from any wound she got, it worked just as well in filtering out her system of anything that could possibly affect her. Maybe before her mind had gotten wiped, she’d been normal, and alcohol had been her vice.

But she didn’t know.

And that was the problem.

The crackle of the old, beat up jukebox in the corner of the almost empty bar pricked at Logan’s sensitive ears. Just like her accelerated healing, all of her senses were cranked up to eleven. A whirling sounded from the metal box as the song switched over and the opening riff of a rock song poured from the speakers.

Just in time for the door to the bar to creak open.

Four sets of shoes tapped across the wooden floor; the heaviness to their steps gave away that they were adult males. That was nothing new, but it was a little past three in the morning and most people would normally be in bed. What was new, however, was a distinct sound that Logan would have recognized in her sleep. It was familiar in a way that she couldn’t explain, but the _click_ of the safety of a shotgun being flicked off had her turning her head to look over her shoulder.

They were of varying heights, though all of them dressed like lumberjacks with bandanas pulled up over their noses to hide their faces. The one closest to the counter had the barrel of a sawed-off shotgun aimed directly between Jack’s eyes as he stood behind the it, while the rest of them held handguns of different types.

“Let’s make this easy,” Shotgun spoke, his voice sounding like he’d swallowed rocks: grating and low. “Give us what ‘ya got ‘an we’ll be on our way.”

Jack’s handlebar moustache twitched, and Logan could practically smell the fear beginning to waft off of his lightly tanned skin. Only two other patrons were inside Screaming Jenny’s ­– a couple by the looks of it – sitting at a table by the far wall. They froze in place, mugs of beer halfway to their lips and faces reflecting shock.

“I ain’t got much of anything,” Jack said. He eyed what Logan knew to be the small lockbox safe located beneath the register. “So, I’m afraid you’re out ‘o luck.”

Shotgun walked further across the bar until he was all-but pressed up against the counter and tilted his head. “But ‘ya got something.” The smirk in his tone was evident. “Hand it over and maybe I won’t hurt ‘ya.”

He hefted his shotgun up higher, his finger hovering over the trigger. Logan couldn’t help the scoff that fled her lips. The sound pulled the attention of the man and he turned his head towards her and gave her a slow once over, green eyes flicking from her black combat boots, to her jeans, her gray camisole and black leather jacket.

“Something funny, sweetheart,” Shotgun asked. He reached out a gloved hand in an attempt to brush her hair back from her face, but Logan was faster. She slapped his hand away roughly before he could make contact and a flash of surprise danced in the man’s heavily lashed eyes.

“Yeah, you,” she answered.

Shotgun laughed and his amusement was echoed by his three cronies who had still yet to speak. “I like my women with a little bit ‘o fire in ‘em. How about ‘ya come with me after this, hm, honey?”

“Or.” Logan raised an eyebrow – she didn’t have much patience to work with in the first place, and that man was beginning to wear what little she had thin – “How about you walk away before I decide to break both of your legs? Hm, asshole?”

She watched as an annoyed tick jumped in the man’s jaw. “You got a mouth on ‘ya. Maybe somebody ought to teach ‘ya a lesson on how to talk to a man.”

His hand shot out again to try and grab her shoulder. Logan felt her patience snap and just _reacted_. Catching his larger fist in her hand, she quickly bent it backwards until she heard _crack_ of his wrist breaking. It seemed to echo throughout the room, and Shotgun’s shout of pain had his three friends turning to aim their handguns at her.

“’Ya _bitch_!” Shotgun cursed, stumbling back a few steps to cradling his now broken wrist to his wide chest. One handed; he swung his weapon from Jack to her. “’Ya gonna regret that!”

“Somehow, I doubt that.” Logan scoffed once more. Her sharp eyes caught the movement of his finger inching towards the trigger of his shotgun almost as if in slow motion. Before he could add any weight to pull it back, the sound of knives unsheathing reverberated over the noisy jukebox.

The pain was an old friend; a sting like white-hot fire tearing apart the muscles and tendons. Logan’s two-foot long, shining, metal claws pierced through the skin of her knuckles between her pointer and middle finger, and middle and ring. The wounds they inflicted beneath her flesh healed over before they could even bleed, and Logan _moved_.

Her clawed hand shot out and the metal tore through the man’s shotgun like hot butter. It exploded in a mess of carbon and shrapnel to litter the wooden floor below. The man let out a short, shocked grunt and all but tripped over his own feet in order to scramble back away from her.

“ _What the hell_?” He exclaimed, gesturing wildly from his friends back to her. “What are ‘ya doing? Shoot her!”

Shots fired, pop, pop, popping in flashes of light as bullets left their shell casing behind and flew at her. Logan felt each and every one that impacted her body, but it only further served to piss her off. With a growl, she raced over towards Shotgun and kicked him in his left leg so hard that the crunching of his bones was buried beneath his agonized screams. The man didn’t even have enough time to fall to the floor before Logan did the same to his other one.

As he crashed into the table behind him, clutching his both of legs with his only good hand, she turned to face the rest of his squad. They watched fearfully while the bullets they’d littered her with were pushed from beneath her skin and plopped to the floor one by one. Logan unsheathed the claws in her other hand and gave them a feral grin.

“Who’s next?”

The one with the orange bandana to match his flannel shirt took it upon himself to shoot at her again.

“Because that obviously worked so well the first time,” Logan snarled in both pain and anger, and lunged across the room.

Orange had the gull to try and aim a punch at her, and she met his fist with hers. Whatever it was that reinforced her skeleton made his shatter. He cried out and dropped his handgun to kneel and clutch his hand. She turned at the waist to slice the man in blue’s revolver in half right as he was about to fire at her again and kicked him hallway across the bar. He hit the lone pool table in the corner and rolled across it before slamming into the floor.

Logan turned to the last man standing and tilted her head to the side, spilling her long brunette hair across her shoulders. “You want a turn too?”

His wide blue eyes dropped to the metal claws sticking out over her hands and he glanced at his friends lying around in various states of incapacitated. Dropping his handgun to the floor, he rapidly shook his head and turned tail, fleeing out of the door as fast as his legs could carry him.

“Thought so,” Logan snorted and retracted her claws back beneath her skin. She could feel the anger still coursing through her veins but tried to tame it down as she turned back to eye Jack. The couple that had been occupying the table in the back had long since vacated, but he still stood behind the counter, jaw dropped while he gaped at her in shock.

Logan didn’t bother to try and console him, that wasn’t in her M.O. Brushing the blood away that stained her cheek from one of the now healed wounds caused by a bullet, she walked back over to the counter and snatched up the bottle of whiskey that she’d abandoned. She knocked back a mouthful on her way out the door and gestured back to Jack halfheartedly without looking.

“I’ll take this as a ‘thank you’ gift. You’re welcome.”

****═══════════** ** ****⍛** ** ****══════════** **

PRESENT TIME

“You illegally read police reports often?”

Logan leaned back in her chair with her lips pursed, fingers absentmindedly dancing around the rim of her whiskey glass that Jack had recently refilled for free. Nick Fury didn’t shrug (she didn’t think he did much of anything besides stare at her with that serious brown hued eye of his). “I wouldn’t call it illegal.”

“Then what would you call it?”

“A precaution.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Precaution for what?”

“For what, indeed,” he hummed. “That’s exactly what I’m here for.”

“I’m not about to start slaughtering people in the streets, if that's what you're worried about.” Logan felt her eyes narrow.

“I’d sure hope not. But that’s not what I meant.” He lowered his voice to barely a whisper so the rest of the bar’s patrons wouldn’t be able to listen in, but she heard him just fine. A test of her abilities, one that she didn’t even know she was taking. “There is currently a threat to the planet out there that far exceeds the warfighting capability of conventional military forces. So, what I’m saying is that we need your help.”

“ _We_?” Logan’s second brow jumped up to join the first.

“S.H.I.E.L.D. and the rest of the team of people like you that that I’m putting together.”

Scoffing, she downed the rest of her drink and stood up for the second time in fifteen minutes, bracing her hands against the table and leaning in. “Look, I don’t do team sports and I’m not interested in you or any of your other boy scouts. I have more important things to do.”

Nick Fury stopped her before she could push off the table. “We have technology and information that you’d never be able to get your grubby little hands on. You’d have unimpeded, high-clearance level access to anything you wanted.”

Logan hesitated for a breath of a moment but kept her facial expression blank. “What makes you think that’s something I’d want?”

“The fact that you’re asking me tells me everything I need to know.” He stood up as well, his height towering over her shorter stature. “We’re meeting in three days’ time. There will be a car parked outside of your motel. If you’re interested in joining us, it’ll take you to the rendezvous point. Don’t be late.”

With that, he turned to make his leave.

“How did you know,” Logan asked him. Nick Fury turned back to look at her from over the shoulder of his good eye. “That name.”

“It’s on your dog tags,” he answered with a nod at the chain dangling from her neck and sauntered his way out of the rundown bar. Logan’s hand unconsciously touched the metal of her WOLVERINE tag and stared after him as he left.

“What a prick.”


End file.
